Michael Larabel

This shouldn't come as any surprise to any longtime Phoronix readers and dedicated open-source/Linux enthusiasts, but Valve with their work on the Steam Deck and SteamOS have been lifting the open-source ecosystem as a whole. A talk this week at the Linux Foundation Europe's Open-Source Summit highlighted some of the great and ongoing contributions by Valve and their partners.

Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.

Hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10, Canonical has pulled the ISOs and is re-spinning them after user-submitted translations for the Ubuntu installer turned out to contain hate speech.

Intel announced this morning on the second day of their Innovation 2023 conference that they are collaborating with software vendors such as Red Hat, Canonical, and SUSE for providing Intel-optimized Linux distributions.

Prominent GNOME developer Christian Hergert announced he created a new terminal emulator that is twice as fast as the closest GPU-based renderer he's found yet so far on Linux, which was Alacritty. Unfortunately though he currently doesn't have any plans to develop this experimental speedy terminal emulator any further.

A nasty vulnerability has been made public today concerning Glibc's dynamic loader that can lead to full root privileges being obtained by local users. This affects Linux distributions of the past two years with the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, 23.04, Fedora 38, and others vulnerable to this local privilege escalation issue.

A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment.

Valve has just released Proton 8.0-4 as stable on the Steam client for enhancing the experience for running Windows games on Linux for this Wine-based software that powers Steam Play.

Queued up this week as part of the HID subsystem fixes ahead of today's Linux 6.6-rc6 kernel test release has been a rather embarrassing bug: unplugging Logitech USB receivers has for the past several months been causing the Linux kernel to crash. After a number of bug reports around this issue from unplugging Logitech keyboard/mice receivers to simply switching away on a USB switch with the device(s) attached, the Linux 6.6-rc6 kernel is carrying the fix and it's also marked for back-porting to existing stable Linux kernel series.

Google is proposing a new mseal() memory sealing system call for the Linux kernel. Google intends for this architecture independent system call to be initially used by the Google Chrome web browser on Chrome OS while experiments are underway for use by Glibc in the dynamic linker to seal all non-writable segments at startup.

It was a decade ago that a security researcher commented on X.Org Server security being even "worse than it looks" and that the GLX code for example was "80,000 lines of sheer terror" and hundreds of bugs being uncovered throughout the codebase. In 2023 new X.Org security vulnerabilities continue to be uncovered, two of which were made public today and date back to X11R2 code from the year 1988.

The widely-used Curl project as a command-line tool and library for transferring data via a variety of protocols is preparing to roll-out Curl 8.4 early in order to address a particularly nasty vulnerability.

ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired a longtime contributor to this "open-source Windows" project to spend the next five months working on the ReactOS GUI setup mode as an alternative to their classic text-based setup mode.

Microsoft has published a big feature update to Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" for running Linux binaries within the confines of Windows 11.

The PipeWire audio and video streams solution for the Linux desktop is planning its big version "1.0" release for later in the year.

One of the new features merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel was multi-grained timestamps for the VFS layer and wiring it up for the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and Tmpfs file-systems. This alternative though to coarse-grained timestamps ended up exposing some problems and this week ahead of Linux 6.6-rc3, the feature has been stripped entirely from the kernel.

While the Linux kernel tends to keep around drivers for even very old hardware, once there are no known users left that would still be updating to new Linux kernel versions or the drivers pose a significant maintenance burden, it's eventually time to let them go. We've seen the WiMAX wireless code removed and now the latest on the Linux wireless networking side inching close to the chopping block are old WiFi drivers.

Several months back was work to disable all Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) drivers in the Linux kernel on the basis of being insecure and other factors. That plan of disabling the RNDIS drivers was faced by opposition around concerns of potentially disrupting USB tethering support and the like. It's been months since hearing anything about updated plans for disabling or dropping the RNDIS drivers but the Git branch was updated today for disabling this class of drivers.

Earlier this year Intel posted x86-simd-sort as a blazing fast sorting library that makes use of AVX-512. When the popular Numpy began using it they found up to 10~17x faster sorts for 16-bit to 64-bit data types. Today Intel software engineers released x86-simd-sort 3.0 and it also comes minutes after OpenJDK merged a modified version of this speeding sorting code into that reference JDK codebase.

Queued up into the Btrfs file-system driver's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.7 cycle is the Temp-FSID (Same-FSID) feature that is being pursued for use by Valve's Steam Deck game console. The functionality is to overcome a limitation of allowing Btrfs to mount two different devices holding the same file-system image and therefore the same file-system ID.

In addition to Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6.0 and without any X11 session support, Fedora stakeholders are also looking at shipping GNOME for the Fedora Workstation 40 release without any X11 session support.

Ahead of the formal announcement on Tuesday, Mozilla today uploaded the Firefox 118.0 release binaries as the latest monthly update for this cross-platform web browser.

Mike Blumenkrantz, who is part of Valve's stellar Linux graphics driver team, has managed another impressive feat of further optimizing the Mesa Vulkan driver code that benefits multiple drivers / hardware vendors.

Following the Counter-Strike 2 limited test since March, Counter-Strike 2 is now officially released and there is also a SteamOS/Linux build now available.

GNOME 45 is out as stable today as the latest six-month update to this open-source desktop environment that will be powering the likes of Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora Workstation 39.